On Saturday night, Clive Palmer stood on stage at the election launch of his own Palmer United party and fulminated about his rivals Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott. “Boring,” he declaimed with typical rhetorical flair, before going on to announce his vision of a new Australia backed by a slideshow featuring his twin passions: Titanic replicas and dinosaurs.

Having minutes earlier entered the room to the strains of Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger, a song so frequently invoked by everyone from politicians to strippers that listening to it is now about as exciting as sitting in traffic, one suspects Palmer’s claim to real dynamism may be optimistic. But Clive did get one thing right: in a modern election, there is no greater sin than being boring (which might explain why he followed it up yesterday by having a go a twerking). And everyone knows it.

Right near the beginning of the campaign, Joe Hockey, the man who would be treasurer, told a group of journalists that Australians would be “bored to death” if our aspiring leaders spent their time discussing trifles such as costings and debt. It was a curious admission from a man whose own party’s focus on acceptable deficit levels could be heard from space, but it certainly set the tone for the facile, Benny Hill-style farce we’ve come to know and tolerate from Election 2013.

Well and truly dead are the ideas. Day after day, policy is calmly jettisoned and then never spoken about again. Why bother? These days, prime ministerial candidates win or lose based on their likability. They campaign on whether their gee-whiz, down-to-earth mannerisms (“Gotta zip!”, “Fair dinkum!”) make them sound human or not. Debates are less debates than they are pre-scripted trash-talking sessions, where the winner is the one who managed to do the best impression of a Muppet coming to life. Both Rudd and Abbott wheel out their daughters in a televised parody of adoration, as if trying to prove to the nation that they really do deserve custody.

It’s all so vulgar you could vomit. What kind of Nickelback listening, SlideShow watching imbecile is being taken in by it all? Surely we don’t deserve to be patronised like this.

And yet...

Here’s a thought experiment: list the top five concrete policies, with figures, that you can remember from either party. Now list your top five photos of Abbott kissing someone weirdly. I’d need to think about the first, but boy do I have the second in a holster. Not only that, I know which one I’m talking about at parties. I know which one I’m sharing on Twitter. And, much as it breaks my once-politically-engaged heart to say it, it ain’t the policy. I have become everything I ever hated. But at least I’m not alone.

We bemoan the triumph of personality over policy. We castigate our political parties and the media for feeding us a diet of soap opera trash masquerading as serious politics. We talk about how much better it would be if everyone started treating one another as adults, and struck up a healthy conversation about de-leveraging our national debt instead.

Yet we can’t turn away. We are hypnotised by the democratic catastrophe unfolding in front of our eyes. Like the reality TV junkie, we assure others that we’re only watching it because it’s awful, because we enjoy watching people we dislike struggle with day-to-day life. Of course in our spare time we’re brushing up on the policy, ready to make an informed, objective decision. But how about Kevin Rudd being rude to his make-up artist? Cor, confirmed everything I already suspected about him, it did. I know who I’ll be voting for on 7 September!

In many ways, a turn towards presidential-style politicking is the natural response to a post-ideological age. Stripped of the easy binaries of left and right, politicians, the papers that report on them and the people that vote based on what they read in those papers need a new way of understanding who hates who and why. When each party’s platform is a deadening and largely indistinguishable mess of special interest spending, we’re no longer able to rely on one side or the other to protect our interests merely by virtue of their being the party of our particular demographic. Just ask the working class, single mothers callously left out in the cold by the Gillard government, or the businesses venting outrage over Abbott’s paid paternity leave scheme.

Instead we have to “trust” the leader to do what’s right, which means trusting them on a more personal, implicit level. Underpinning all this cloying idiocy – all this kissing and hugging and tear-shedding – you can see some desire to find out if Rudd and Abbott are, when all is said and done, good people. Whether you can trust them not to go a little “Nixon-y”. And that’s an admirable enough mission. After all, we don’t want another Latham.

But even if we’re never going to be the policy wonks that true democracy might demand, perhaps there’s still something more to be fought for here – some grander example of the possibilities of representative government. Maybe a leader who doesn’t want to simply be liked, but who is willing and bold enough to articulate an optimistic and far-reaching vision for this country. A leader who can tell us a convincing story about ourselves and our place in the world. Hell, at this point I’d accept any leader whose basic charisma means that they don’t have to stage manage their own humanity.

We’re not going to find it in the next 10 days. But, hey, there’s always 2016.